suture line

I spent the duration of ward church on Sunday in the company of a tiny baby. His name is Alfred. I have no idea how old he is or what his father's name is or anything else about him. He was placed in my arms by his smiling mother, and he snuggled into the corner of my elbow and slept through the singing and drumming and dancing.

It was a joyful service. As soon as we had sardine-wedged ourselves properly into the ward, we started to sing, and almost everyone felt the need to leave their hard-fought slot on bed or chair and stand up to praise. Alfred slumbered through my swayings, nestling in his touqued head a little closer when the drums got too loud. When we were finished singing, no one wanted to stop praising, and the words of the saints rose through the low ceilings of the ward.

With the sounds of prayer all around me, I looked down at the small boy in my arms. His little face was almost perfectly formed. Almost. Soft lashes curled against creamy brown cheeks framing a tiny button nose. Running down his top lip, though, a neat row of stitches. Because Alfred was born with a cleft lip, a gash splitting the top of his mouth wide open and, if it had been left that way, condemning him to a life of ridicule. And he had come to us to have that life put back together.

I stood there and just couldn't stop looking at those sutures. As patients and nurses and crew members prayed around me, it was nothing short of overwhelming to think about what had gone into those few little stitches holding together that small lip.

People from around the world leave homes and families and familiarity and come to live on a ship where everything is held to the walls with magnets and the horizon is never still. There are deckhands and officers and electricians and cooks and toilet cleaners. There are children and carpenters and teachers and pastors and librarians. There are doctors and pharmacists and anesthetists and nurses. We are hundreds of people thousands of miles of home, and we are all here so that the hands of a surgeon can quietly sew together the broken pieces of a child's life.

Three or four hundred people for five or six knots. In no other reckoning would this kind of arithmetic be acceptable. Faced with the broken body of Christ, I can figure things no other way. In the most extravagant gesture this world will ever see, God stripped himself of everything but that dim reflection of his own glory that our humanity implies. He put on skin and squalor, and he poured out his love without reservation. For the healing of bodies and souls, giving everything was not too much.

I'm glad I live and love among people who are led in the same way.